In 26 provinces, explains El País, Covid patients occupy more than 25% of the beds while five regions (Canary Islands, Navarre, Basque Country, Aragon and Cantabria) have registered the highest number of ordinary hospitalizations since the beginning of the vaccination campaign.
Spain struggling with Covid: it is not a flu, half of the intensive care units at high risk due to the new wave.
Covid a cold? Not really. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has just announced that he wants to change his approach to SARS-CoV-2. That is, try to manage it no longer as an emergency, but as an endemic disease more like the flu. At the moment, however, a clear change of strategy risks being untimely; this is because the situation in the country still appears rather critical. To tell it is El País. According to the Spanish newspaper, half of ICUs are at high risk due to a resurgence of the epidemic. In 26 provinces, explains El País, Covid patients occupy more than 25% of ICU beds, while five regions (Canary Islands, Navarre, Basque Country, Aragon and Cantabria) have registered the highest number of ordinary hospitalizations since the beginning of vaccination campaign.
However, the bulletin is much better than a year ago when the country was facing the third wave of the epidemic. Hospitals then had to accept more than 27,000 Covid patients in regular wards and nearly 5,000 in intensive care. Today, with three times the number of infections, there are 14 thousand ordinary hospitalizations and 2 thousand in intensive care. All of this was possible, El País points out, thanks to the protection offered by vaccines. Spain is one of the most covered countries in Europe: 81% of the inhabitants have at least two doses of the vaccine and 31% have done the booster dose).
Yet in some regions there are more Covid-19 patients in hospital than there were at the worst times of last winter. This happens especially in the Canary Islands, where Covid has hit in previous waves more mildly than in the rest of Spain, as well as in the provinces of the Basque Country, Aragon and Catalonia.
According to health authorities, most of the people hospitalized at this time were infected during the Christmas holidays. But there are still no precise numbers as to how many of these infections were caused by the Omicron variant. Delta, however, continues to be a problem. According to information gathered by El Pais, many patients still end up in hospital due to the Delta strain, especially with regard to intensive care. The Spanish newspaper then makes a comparison with France. There, patients infected with the Delta variant are the majority in intensive care, while Omicron accounts for only 19% of hospitalizations. In the ordinary wards, however, most of the cases are due to the new variant. However, Omicron causes milder illness and therefore faster hospitalizations. According to the doctors consulted by El Pais, a similar trend is being observed in Spain.
In some structures the pressure is very high. El País says that 35% of ICU beds in a Barcelona hospital are occupied by Covid patients, and this has prompted some surgeries to be rescheduled.
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